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“I was in the winter of my life- and the men I met along the road were my only summer. At night I fell sleep with visions of myself dancing and laughing and crying with them. Three years down the line of being on an endless world tour and memories of them were the only things that sustained me, and my only real happy times. I was a singer, not a very popular one, who once had dreams of becoming a beautiful poet- but upon an unfortunate series of events saw those dreams dashed and divided like a million stars in the night sky that I wished on over and over again- sparkling and broken. But I really didn’t mind because I knew that it takes getting everything you ever wanted and then losing it to know what true freedom is.

When the people I used to know found out what I had been doing, how I had been living- they asked me why. But there’s no use in talking to people who have a home, they have no idea what its like to seek safety in other people, for home to be wherever you lay your head.

I was always an unusual girl, my mother told me that I had a chameleon soul. No moral compass pointing me due north, no fixed personality. Just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide as wavering as the ocean. And if I said that I didn’t plan for it to turn out this way I’d be lying- because I was born to be the other woman. I belonged to no one- who belonged to everyone, who had nothing- who wanted everything with a fire for every experience and an obsession for freedom that terrified me to the point that I couldn’t even talk about- and pushed me to a nomadic point of madness that both dazzled and dizzied me.

Every night I used to pray that I’d find my people- and finally I did- on the open road. We have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, nothing we desired anymore- except to make our lives into a work of art.

Who are you?
Are you in touch with all of your darkest fantasies?
Have you created a life for yourself where you can experience them?
I have. I am fucking crazy.
But I am free.’

If you down with the rich man, and that can be rich in anything
Don’t you take too much
If you laugh at a poor man, and that can be poor in anything
Don’t you laugh too much
If you trying to be rich man, and that can be rich in anything
Don’t you take too much
And if you need to be needed, and you’re looking for purpose
Just remember, don’t you need too much…

If you take something you, don’t need, and keep it,
Then you’ve stolen from somebody else who’s hungry,
Everything that you do, is everything you are,
Everything that I am, is everything you’ll ever need.

Money can buy power, but it can’t buy respect;

Money can’t buy sleep, but it can buy a bed
Money can’t buy you love, but it can buy sex
Do you posses money or by money are you possessed?
Money can buy a house, but it can’t buy a home
So even with money you still feel all alone
Money can buy you friends, but it can’t buy family
Money can’t make you happy, that’s just a fallacy
It can buy a bath, but it can’t buy purity
It can buy bodyguards, but it can’t buy security
While people around the world starve, I eat

Cause money can buy war, but it can’t buy peace
Some do everything and anything to get the p’sThe society we living in, it’s a necessity
It’s got the power to turn your best friends to enemies
It’s funny cause money doesn’t follow us when we leave

Does happiness live in a mansion with a swimming pool?
I know people with plenty of money that are miserable
We all need to earn in this world we live
Most work for it, some steal, but many worship it
Some sell poison for it, some seek employment for it
We need it to survive, so some clean the toilets for it
I need papes to live but never will I live for paper
Abolish the Queen, I don’t wanna see that witch’s face
Many sell their soul for it, no not me
Some will try to tell you that it doesn’t grow on trees
I heard the saying said, many a time, but they were wrong
Cause if it doesn’t tell me then where do you get the paper from?
Most think they will be happy if they only had more of it
Some waste it, some feel more important because they’re born with it
Some have got the nerve to say you’re fraudulent for forging it
The truth is you don’t need a fortune to be fortunate.

We smile at each other
and I lean back against the wicker couch.
How does it feel to be dead? I say.
You touch my knees with your blue fingers.
And when you open your mouth,
a ball of yellow light falls to the floor
and burns a hole through it.
Don’t tell me, I say. I don’t want to hear.
Did you ever, you start,
wear a certain kind of dress
and just by accident,
so inconsequential you barely notice it,
your fingers graze that dress
and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,
you see it too
and you realize how that image
is simply the extension of another image,
that your own life
is a chain of words
that one day will snap.
Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,
and beginning to rise heavenward
in their confirmation dresses,
like white helium balloons,
the wreathes of flowers on their heads spinning,
and above all that,
that’s where I’m floating,
and that’s what it’s like
only ten times clearer,
ten times more horrible.
Could anyone alive survive it?

(born Florence Anthony, Ai is an African American poet. Ai is a Japanese word meaning of love)